Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, CB, FRS was a British electrical engineer, industrialist and inventor. He was a pioneer of electric lighting and public electricity supply systems. The company he formed, Crompton & Co., was one of the world’s first large-scale manufacturers of electrical equipment.
Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, was a British inventor and pioneer in electrical development.
Evelyn Crompton was born at Sion Hill, near Thirsk, Yorkshire. From an early age he was interested in machines and engineering. A trip to the Great Exhibition aged 6 had a profound impact on him.
His schooling started at Sharow, near Ripon in Yorkshire in 1856 he went to school at Elstree, and then on to Harrow (1858–60). Crompton’s education was interrupted by the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. After the Crimea, Crompton returned to Britain and went to Harrow School. He eschewed the school’s highly classical education, decided to study extra mathematics. He built his own static electricity generator and performed experiments with Leyden Jars. During a summer holiday, he designed and built a road-going steam tractor called Bluebell. He trained at the Doncaster Works of the Great Northern Railway. In 1864 he joined the British Army and served in the Rifle Brigade in India.

After military service, where he had introduced steam-driven road transport, Crompton in 1875 became a partner in an engineering firm at Chelmsford, Essex, and soon broadened its activity to the construction of dynamos and arc lamps and the installation of lighting apparatus. In 1878 he invented an arc lamp with an overhead support mechanism to reduce shadow; previous lamps had been constructed with the support mechanism below the electrodes, producing noticeable shadows.
Crompton is best known for his lighting installations. It is claimed that his house in Porchester Gardens was the first private residence effectively supplied with electric light (1879). He also lit the Law Courts, Buckingham Palace, and the Vienna Opera House and installed one of the first power-supply stations at Kensington Court, London (1886). He advocated the use of direct current for distribution systems, in contrast to the alternating current promoted by Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, which was later adopted generally.